Blockchain payment rails are increasingly coming to the rescue of legacy financial systems carrying the weight of poor compatibility, layered, multi-tiered structure, hidden fees, slow settlement and complex cross-border management. Companies like Polygon Labs create the next-gen infrastructure that can facilitate money movement across different fiat and crypto verticals.
As the blockchain platform rolls out its innovative Open Money Stack, PaySpace Magazine Global set down with Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, to discuss where stablecoins fit into the global payment ecosystem, the basics of stablecoin orchestration, convergence of tokenized RWAs with stablecoin rails, and onchain surge of omnipresent AI-driven agentic payments, about 80% of which currently happen on Polygon rails.
PaySpace Magazine (PSM): Polygon Labs is known for its focus on fundamental crypto payment infrastructure and real-world settlement utility. With the recent acquisition of Coinme and Sequence, which real-world use cases can we expect the forthcoming Polygon Open Money Stack to power?
Marc Boiron (MB): The acquisitions enable all use cases that involve money movement in a more efficient way than exists today, whether for more efficient bank transfers; FinTechs, marketplaces, and remittance platforms to offer faster and more cost-efficient transfers; enterprises treasury movement or gig-economy payouts; or merchant payment acceptance in emerging countries with less developed infrastructure.
There’s been a lot of work to get to this point. Polygon Labs has always focused on building core infrastructure for how money moves in the real world. With the acquisition of Coinme and Sequence, the Polygon Open Money Stack is aimed squarely at use cases where existing financial rails are slow, costly, or structurally limited, while recognizing that most money still exists on those rails and need to be brought onto new rails.
Cross-border payments and international settlement are the most immediate examples. Today, these flows depend on correspondent banking networks, multi-day settlement cycles, opaque fees, and restricted operating hours. Stablecoins materially change that equation. With the Open Money Stack, cross-border payments can settle in seconds, operate continuously, and deliver predictable pricing.
Another major area of focus is enterprise payouts, including payroll, creator earnings, and gig-economy disbursements. These businesses increasingly operate on a global basis but are forced to manage fragmented, country-by-country payment infrastructure. By combining Coinme’s regulated fiat on- and off-ramps across 48 U.S. states with Sequence’s cross-chain orchestration through Trails, enterprises can integrate once and reach recipients globally.
Merchant settlement is also a meaningful opportunity, particularly for businesses operating across multiple currencies and in emerging countries. Settling in stablecoins and converting to local currencies as needed removes delays, reduces fees, and simplifies treasury operations compared to traditional rails. In some cases, it’ll make payments possible where they are not today.
We are not trying to replace domestic payments at the point of sale in developed markets. Those systems already function well. Our focus is on the harder problems: cross-border flows, multi-currency settlement, emerging country merchant payments, and complex compliance environments where blockchain-based infrastructure provides clear advantages over legacy systems.
PSM: One of the features labeled as “soon to come” for your new integrated stack of blockchain payment services is ‘Stablecoin orchestration’ – enterprise payments infrastructure for stablecoins and tokenized deposits. How does that work? Is that a siloed blockchain management system or would it also integrate or bridge with existing fiat-focused payment orchestration tools?
MB: It’s designed to integrate with existing systems. The stablecoin orchestration layer handles routing, conversion, and settlement across chains and stablecoin types and abstracts away the complexity of managing multiple blockchains, bridges, and liquidity sources. Enterprises shouldn’t have to rebuild their payment infrastructure to use it.
Through Coinme’s APIs and Sequence’s Trails engine, businesses can plug stablecoin capabilities into their existing payment flows. If you’re already running payroll through ADP or Workday, you don’t need to change that. The Open Money Stack sits alongside those systems. The goal is modularity, so you can adopt the parts you need, ignore what you don’t, and swap components over time without rebuilding your entire system.
PSM: At present, USD-backed stablecoins still dominate global markets. However, we also see a growing number of EUR-denominated tokens and emerging projects for stablecoins supported by other local currencies such as GBP or Korean won. From the perspective of a stablecoin infrastructure provider, does that pose an extra challenge?
MB: Fragmentation is the core challenge here, not necessarily the shift towards multi-currency stablecoins. USD stablecoins dominate today because its initial use case was for trading. However, this likely will perpetuate because global liquidity, treasury operations, and cross-border commerce are still largely dollar-centric, especially when stablecoins make US dollars even easier to access and hold. As EUR, GBP, or KRW stablecoins grow, the key requirement is ensuring they can move, settle, and convert seamlessly across jurisdictions, rails, and compliance regimes. Without that, you simply recreate the same corridor-by-corridor complexity that exists in correspondent banking.
That’s exactly what the Open Money Stack is designed to abstract away. We treat stablecoins as interchangeable settlement instruments, regardless of denomination, and focus on orchestration, liquidity access, compliance, and finality end to end. For institutions and fintechs, the goal is not to care which stablecoin is used under the hood, but to reliably move value 24/7, with predictable costs and regulatory clarity. In that sense, more local-currency stablecoins are a feature of a maturing market, not a complication, provided the underlying infrastructure is built to handle them as one unified system rather than isolated rails. Polygon has already been a leader in non-USD stables and can expand that through its planned FX engine to enable onchain exchange of USD and non-USD stablecoins that will make this even easier.
PSM: Most stablecoins we hear about are built on private blockchain rails. However, today, there are also many discussions about sovereign stablecoin initiatives. Are these similar to CBDCs? Which type of stable fiat-backed digital assets, in your opinion, has most potential?
MB: The fundamental difference between CBDCs and private stablecoins is about who controls the rails and who gets to build on them.
CBDCs are closed systems. They’re designed for sovereign control, which makes sense for specific use cases like interbank settlement or domestic monetary policy transmission. But that control comes with limitations. You can’t build on them without permission. Innovation happens at the pace of government procurement. And they’re typically optimized for domestic use cases rather than cross-border commerce. They also have serious risks around privacy, unless taken into account structurally.
Private stablecoins on public blockchains are fundamentally different. They’re permissionless. Anyone can build payment applications, treasury management tools, or entirely new financial services on top of them without asking for approval. That’s what drives innovation. It’s also what makes them better suited for global commerce, where businesses need to move money across borders continuously, programmatically, and at predictable costs.
Both stablecoins and CBDCs will exist. CBDCs will serve sovereign functions where control and policy transmission matter most. But for cross-border payments, enterprise treasury operations, and real-world business activity, regulated, fiat-backed stablecoins running on open infrastructure are what solve these problems today. They’re programmable, they operate 24/7, and they don’t require rebuilding the system every time you want to add a new feature.
The real opportunity is building infrastructure that works with both digital sovereign money and private stablecoins so that they can interoperate where it makes sense, while each serves the use cases for which they’re best designed.
PSM: Even those countries that remain sceptical about crypto in different forms, often legalize tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) including popular tokenized money market funds (MMFs). What’s interesting is that this blockchain infrastructure increasingly merges with stablecoin rails. Could you tell us more about this convergence, in particular, from a payments and settlement perspective?
MB: Tokenized RWAs like money market funds, treasuries, and real estate are increasingly settled on the same rails as stablecoins. Both require the same underlying capabilities: fast settlement, transparent custody, programmable ownership, and global accessibility.
Traditionally, if you wanted to use your MMF holdings to make a payment, you’d need to redeem, wait for settlement, transfer fiat, and then execute the transaction. With tokenized assets on stablecoin rails, that entire flow can collapse into a single atomic operation.
When both the payment instrument (stablecoins) and the underlying asset (tokenized securities or funds) exist on the same programmable infrastructure, you can build sophisticated financial flows that were previously impossible, like instant collateralization, real-time yield optimization, and programmable escrow tied to real-world events.
PSM: The last but not even closely least topic I would like to discuss today is omnipresent AI and more specifically AI-driven agentic payments. TradFi paytech providers are racing to create some kind of supporting payment protocols for these automated transactions. What about programmable money infrastructure? Is it agent-ready?
MB: Blockchain-native payment infrastructure is better positioned for agentic payments than traditional rails. AI agents need payment systems that are programmable, permissionless, and capable of executing transactions autonomously, 24/7, without human intervention at each step. Traditional payment rails aren’t designed for this.
Stablecoins solve several core problems. Transactions can execute programmatically based on predefined conditions. Settlement is near-instant and doesn’t require intermediary approvals. The entire system operates continuously. And critically, every transaction is transparent and verifiable on-chain, which makes it safer to delegate financial operations to autonomous agents. Traditional payment systems require human approval precisely because they lack that transparency and auditability.
By using blockchains and stablecoins, an AI agent managing a company’s treasury could automatically rebalance between yield-generating positions and stablecoin liquidity based on predicted payment needs. Similarly, an agent coordinating international supply chains could trigger payments instantly when shipment milestones are verified on-chain.
PSM: As the year is just beginning, and payment technologies are evolving incredibly fast, our audience would also like to know what do you think will fundamentally change in global payments in 2026?
MB: The U.S. has the GENIUS Act. The EU has MiCA in effect. Other major jurisdictions are following. This kind of regulatory clarity will accelerate adoption because institutions finally can use stablecoins without existential compliance risk.
Cross-border payments will see even greater stablecoin penetration. The economics are simply too compelling: faster settlement, lower fees, 24/7 operation.
We’ll also see the emergence of more vertically integrated stablecoin infrastructure. The market has been fragmented, with separate providers for on-ramps, wallets, orchestration, and settlement. Companies that can offer end-to-end solutions will capture a disproportionate share of the market.
The real change will be stablecoins moving from a technology category to a payment category that gets integrated into the same workflows and systems that move trillions of dollars today.
